You can actually do it in TWO words: “Explosive Diarrhea”NOBODY wants you to come to work when there’s a possibility of getting in your way to the bathroom and possibly getting hit with “friendly” fire as you pass by.

See, in our house, with my wife’s gut stuff, if she suspects that her intestines are going to go weird, we make SURE that she goes to work that day. Her office has industrial office toilets which are more powerful than residential toilets, and if she manages to clog it anyway, it’s someone else’s job to fix it other than me.

It helps that she works for several different managers doing cross-team sorts of things, and on multiple unrelated projects (she has a unique set of skills and historical knowledge of how various pieces of software the company has written works under the hood, so lots of people need her), so if she’s away from her desk for a couple hours, everybody assumes she’s just working in some other building for some other group.

“And in global news today, a new epidemic has brought the working world to a grinding halt, as employees everywhere find themselves glued to their toilets indefinitely in light of an unidentified epidemic. Economists are still analyzing the effects of a long-term case of “Workday Poopitis”. Film at 11:00.”